Ships were pretty nice. They just rocked back and forth, and stayed on top of a layer of fluid by dint of being full of a less dense fluid, displacing the weight of the material making up its structure and no more. Throwing a person overboard would make the water level go down slightly because then the boat wasn’t displacing quite as much mass, and instead the water would only have to deal with the actual volume of the person in question rather than the weight spread out and influenced by the mitigating factor of the air also brought in to counteract the slight sinking of the ship, which itself added a slight bit of volume into the displacement equation. Also, unlike a human, the experiment couldn’t get seasick.
Rolling up to one of the completely regular looking humans, non literally, mainly because they had done some empirical testing and checked to find that rolling around everywhere was not in fact faster than walking, nor was jumping, the experiment put on it’s best smile and tried to make conversation.
“Yo what up.”
The human recoils in disgust, drawing a sword. Well, that was a fairly typical reaction. Now that it thought about it, it probably would be better off not trying to interact with people who couldn’t understand it, at least not without its mobile translator unit nearby. Wherever that human got off to, it was probably going to have to follow. Only then could it engage in honorable dialog with those who did not inherently speak its unnecessarily complicated and illogical language. If it kept away from topics of any actual importance, maybe the enemy wouldn’t even bother with censoring the content of its messages.
In the back of the ship, it eventually finds the food court. Its human was hanging out with the experiment’s loot buddy, eating some sort of melon sized egg. Either it was an egg, or it was a very weird oval shaped white fruit. Regardless, the experiment waited almost seven seconds before it got bored of trying to patiently allow her to finish eating and climbed up onto a seat next to her.
“H e e e e e e y,” it says, sidling up to the armorless human, knowing that anything it said wouldn’t be understood. If only the human had mastered the art of eating while wearing a completely solid face mask blocking out any access to the mouth. Only then would they be unstoppable, both invulnerable to instant headshots, barring sufficiently powerful attacks. It was going to have to lay out exactly what the armor was good against, now that it thought about it. While it was great against explosives, massive energy cannons, gravity, and other things that were sure to do massive amounts of damage if they connected, the nature of the entire assembly meant it had some significant weaknesses that come into play when, for example, only a couple disconnected parts were on the person in question.
Rather unsurprisingly, the human ignores its polite greeting in favor of continuing to devour the egg. Definitely an egg, from what it could see. The outer part was a bit jiggly, but the inside had a yellow yolk just sitting there for the human to drink. An absolute unit of a yolk, to be honest. The thing was probably bigger than some full grown mammals. How a single human expected to eat that thing escaped it.
Thinking of something, the experiment feels the ambient energy around itself. There wasn’t any excessive concentration of miasma in this below deck area, nor was there an abundance of the mutating radiation the human had identified as ‘energy of the heavens’. Either she had already absorbed all of the material before taking off the helmet, which it gave a low probability of being correct given how long the energy had taken to disperse or burn off the last time she had removed the helmet, or the new intangible storage system it had ‘procured’ for her was able to hold the insubstantial material when it was contained within a static container. If that worked, it would be able to bottle up a massive amount of ‘monster’ generating clouds for future use, with no chance of the material being rendered unusable by the regular environmental changes that apparently kept people from going outdoors at night, but also made them perfectly fine walking around without any obvious weaponry during the day.
Good thing it had looted an enormous number of bottles.
Finally, the human finishes devouring the proto meat oval and puts the helmet back on. By now though, the experiment had completely forgotten what it originally came down for, and focuses instead on the telekinetic feel of the inside of her helmet. As suspected, while there was a slight decrease in density for the miasmic contamination, the majority of the energies it had shoved into the space were intact despite the helmet itself having dematerialized for at least the duration of a meal.
“I’m going to need you to come with me up to the deck,” the experiment states, “I’ve got a couple hypothesis to test.”
“It’s night though, there will be monsters out there in the darkness,” she reasons, “It’s significantly safer indoors, particularly since there’s nowhere to run on a ship.”
“You seem to have forgotten that I can just remove the miasma from the air, and that keeps the monsters from generating at all. There’s no reason to run beyond self improvement, though you did mention that you do make gains by exercising.”
“Fine,” responds the human, standing back up. “I’ll come with you.”
With cooperation assured, the experiment leads the way back up onto the deck. Breaking out into the open sea air, the massive planet swirls angrily above the ship, spewing its miasmic energies all across the entire satellite, or at least the face of it currently exposed to the so called ‘moon’. How the humans of this place managed to redefine the word moon to mean the planet they were currently orbiting amazed the experiment, but it supposed that wasn’t really a matter of the humans calling it something different. Rather, this was an issue of the translator deciding that the word the humans around it were using to define the planet being most closely associated with the word moon. How it decided that, it had no idea, but it wasn’t exactly a linguistics focused creature. Etymology certainly wasn’t one of its interests.
“So, you were going to tell me what I can do with the armor?”
Whoops, that was definitely not what it was planning on doing right now. Distraction! Introductions to the crew maybe?
“Before doing anything like that, I need your help with translating so that people don’t try to stab me on sight.”
“Oh yeah, that makes sense. It is night, and you clearly aren’t a regular human.”
“Well that’s a hurtful statement. It’s accurate, but still.”
She moves over to the guy that had drawn steel on the experiment earlier, and it takes advantage of the opportunity to take a sip of the poison it had secured inside its sleeve. The stick was a bit more annoying to haul around, but at least it could hold the thing with its tail while it swam normally. A human would have even more difficulty dealing with holding all of this stuff.
“Hello, might I ask your name?” questions the human.
“Yar, I be Ren Chuan, and standin’ watch. Don’t need no child distractin’ me when a sea monster could be comin’ out a tha thin air ta wreck tha ship.”
“Well okay,” replies the human again, “I’m Kepa Ying-”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Oh that’s your name,” interrupts the experiment, tucking the bottle back into its sleeve. Now was the time to start pulling the miasma back in and filling up the helmet, so the distraction had run its course and there was no point in trying to interact with other humans anymore.
“You already knew that, you’re the one that named me!” states the girl angrily, turning back toward the experiment.
“What, no I didn’t oh wait right got it. I named you. Thanks for telling me your name,” the experiment rapidly bloviates, refraining from any… more delicate explanations for the moment.
“Quit stalling, tell me how the armor works already!”
“Uh, this is something that requires a bit of discretion. Hey Ren, would you kindly leave for a bit so we can talk?”
“This is our ship, an’ I’m on watch. You shove off mate.”
“Alright fine, Kepa Ying, let’s just go down to the storage area and pull out all the alcohol.”
The experiment walks away from the view of jupiter. A massive red eye staring from a supermassive planet that constantly spews deadly monsters didn’t seem like a good conversation partner, and the guard human was about the same in terms of congeniality. At least it was warmer and drier under the deck, since there wasn’t a constant spray of salt water from the waves crashing against the hull. It wouldn’t be able to syphon off the miasma while it was enclosed, only because it wouldn’t be able to pull it through closed doors. Once it had a good bottle to leave up on the deck, it could just pull the gunk down from where it was relaxing in one of the bunks. It wasn’t like it had to see what it was doing or anything like that.
Storage was under the crew quarters as it turned out. It was mostly full of unlabeled crates, probably filled with the provisions and supplies necessary for a boat full of nominal soldiers out to raid like a viking horde. Now, it was going to be full of booze.
“Would you kindly drop off the entire liquor store?” the experiment asks the girl. She acquiesces, filling a space between the wide pathway, in the center of the boat that runs from aft to stern, and the hull, off to the port side. Bottles spill out onto the walkway, completely filling the depression down to the base, up the wooden struts holding the decks apart, and against a few of the crate stacks. Like a horde of coins, the bottles lay still against each other even as the ship rocks with the waves.
“I think that might have tilted the boat to the side a little bit,” says Kepa Ying hesitantly.
“It’s f i i i i i i n e,” responds the experiment. “Your subspace negates all the weight of everything you put into it, if the ship starts to fall over you can just drop some rocks on the other side.”
“Just tell me everything I can do already!”
“F i i i i i i i i i i i n e,” it says, poking the controls to the holographic caption projector as it continued showing the one thing it had been repeating. As long as it kept doing the exact same thing, the helmet would be locked in one specific configuration and it could figure out the controls by trial and error through brute force telekinetic poking. It hadn’t actually used the external captions option before, so it had no idea where the button to turn it off was, but it was probably somewhere in the settings area. It was just a matter of prodding every area twice to turn it off and on again, until one of those touchscreen bits actually had an effect on the projector.
The fact that the touchscreen was on the inside of a helmet made that particular feature completely redundant for anyone or anything that didn’t either have a very long tongue or telekinesis.
Once the ‘i i i i i i i n e’ finally stops hanging out in the air, the experiment can finally breathe in. That had only been a couple of minutes of standing completely still and holding out a word. Completely normal things. Nothing to find suspicious in the slightest.
“Ok, so. There are a bunch of features that you aren’t going to be able to use for a couple of reasons.”
“That’s not a comforting start,” responds the human, crossing her arms across her chest.
“Don’t worry, most of the reasons are things we can address. For instance, since the individual components aren’t connected to each other at the moment, they wouldn’t be able to coordinate their various functions for synergistic effects, like when the legs use the helmet’s spatial mapping software to autonomously generate optimal paths, or when the arm repairs another subsystem through the function of yet another part that isn’t attached.”
“So once I find more pieces of the armor, the things I already have will be more effective,” Kepa Ying summarizes.
“Correct! Having two legs works much better than having one, for example. With only one leg, you’re probably going to be limited to the one legged skating technique, and using the jets at the bottom to do kicking damage. Trying to jump with the jets is probably a bad idea, since you would have to land with one leg, or manage to take the entire brunt of gravity without the general resistance of the armor itself.”
“And what kind of resistance am I expecting here?”
“Don’t take it the wrong way, but it’s also a bit of a two sided coin. It’s very heavy armor, so it’s going to naturally slow your movements, which is what the various systems in the leg were put in to counteract. I would say that for just standard walking and the like, you can expect to have a twenty percent reduction in your general athletic capabilities while wearing the full set. On the other hand, any projectile based attacks are going to be stopped by that thing, and assuming that you actually manage to make the armor take the brunt of the force it’s enough to handle the impact of a planet running into you at full speed. Well, it’s more accurate to say that the projectile would be reduced down to the effect of being punched, and being punched would just be reduced down in effectiveness. That would be the passive defenses, basically just being the thing in between you and whatever’s about to run into you. Until the chestpiece is back on, the actual defenses aren’t going to be activating, that’s for sure.”
“What kind of actual defenses?”
“You know how you get hit by things? Imagine that the armor just makes it so that those things just don’t come anywhere near you at all.”
“Huh.”
“Anyway, that leaves the left arm there. It’s the less generally useful one, in your situation. It has the repair functionality, so if you were to supply it with energy, which you can’t do because the thing isn’t attached to anything, it can utilize nearby material to backfill broken objects to their original state. That’s relative though. If it’s a really old statue, you’d need a lot of energy to turn it back into a mountain, and you’d probably end up in a gigantic hole.”
“Didn’t you use tribulation lightning to do something with the helmet already?”
“Oh yeah. Uh, don’t worry about that. Also, try not to do anything energy intensive with that thing. Use the scanning function, connect to wi fi if they have it, maybe use the calculator, but don’t try to run Crysis. That’s a bad idea for reasons that I don’t want to get into. What’s tribulation lightning, exactly?”
“The main difficulty a magical beast will experience in regards to the growth of their cultivation is tribulation lightning. Whenever they break through to another level, they will be struck by bolts numbering the level times itself, with each level’s tribulation a more powerful shock than the last.”
“Do you mean each bolt is more powerful or just that the total amount of electricity slamming into the recipient is greater? I mean, the first one seems like it might be a little problematic.”
“It is in fact the first one. Also the second one.”
“Guess that provides a bit of incentive not to get as strong as possible with no stops. Maybe I should stop draining all the energy from everywhere for you.”
“No no, the beasts are the only ones that have to suffer the trials of heaven. Humans only need to worry about that when near a beast that's making a breakthrough or if they fly into the sky at night.”
“I i i i i n t e r e s t i n g.”
“Not really. It’s more inconvenient than anything else. What’s worse is when the opposite happens, because it can strike human and beast alike.”
“That sounds extremely concerning, but I’m gonna switch the topic back to the arm because I didn’t get to the good part.”
“Please, tell me.”
“While the torso isn’t attached, and so it can’t use the battery as a power source to increase the rate of fire, the left arm specifically had enough weaponry packed into it to blow up a moon. The auxiliary controller is the only real way to enable all of it to work at maximum efficiency, but even without anything synergizing with it, you will still be able to fire a projectile explosive with a twenty meter blast radius. Please do not use that indoors.”
“Thank.”
“No I mean it, I really don’t want to try and swim back to solid ground.”